The Trump administration will soon begin a massive deportation campaign, Donald Trump tweeted Monday night. Though the biggest issue here is the cruelty, there are also questions about the claim itself and, if true, the fact that he tipped the public off to a coming ICE action.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in,” Trump tweeted. But last year, when Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned people about an upcoming immigration raid, the Trump administration threatened her with prosecution, calling her warning “reckless” and saying that it “increased that risk for my officers and alerted criminal aliens.”
But does it surprise anyone that Trump would be reckless when he wants to brag about his viciousness?
There are also major questions about whether ICE is really in a position to execute the kind of brutal large-scale sweep Trump described, which in theory requires knowing whom to target for deportation and where they are, as well as little things like not separating families by arresting parents while kids are gone and leaving the children alone. Separating families at the border is bad publicity; doing it internally could be worse. And speaking of the border, Trump has so many ICE agents there that there probably aren’t enough to also go after “millions” of undocumented immigrants living their lives quietly in the U.S.
But those are exactly the concerns that contributed to Trump’s recent purge at the Department of Homeland Security—then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello didn’t jump fast enough to sweep up and deport masses of people, so Trump got rid of them. He doesn’t care about competently executing his inhumane plans; he just wants to see someone making a good-faith effort to be as evil as he is.
So … this is a Trump tweet. Is there something vicious coming? Almost certainly. Will it live up to his billing? Probably not.